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Study suggests changing TB guidelines

Respiratory Care Weekly, January 3, 2007

Categorizing all foreign-born U.S. residents and visitors from countries where tuberculosis (TB) is most prevalent as "high-risk" would lead to eliminating the disease in this country, according to the January American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care. The study set out to explain why TB rates rose 5% among foreign-born Americans since 1993, while cases among natives dropped 93%.

"There is no policy to test foreign-born persons for latent TB infection before entering the U.S. or to test them after they have lived here for more than five years," said Kevin Cain, MD, of the Division of Tuberculosis Elimination at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and lead study author. "As such, present guidelines do not currently address the burden of latent TB infection in the foreign-born subgroup."

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